Holocaust Narratives Research Articles

Sites of Terror and the Role of Memory in Shaping Identity Among First Generation Descendants of the Holocaust

This research explores the ways in which the transmission of memory at Nazi sites of terror influences the construction of Holocaust descendant identity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 children of Holocaust survivors who visited Nazi sites of terror in Eastern and Western Europe, the study examines the interactive nature of Holocaust memorialization and the impact of site-specific memory on Holocaust identification among children of survivors. The findings of the study reveal that, as interactive frames of social remembrance, sites of terror serve as objects of memory in which Holocaust narratives are recalled and re-experienced through an emotional engagement with the traumas of the past. The interaction at Holocaust sites thus strengthens descendant identity formation through the arousal of anxiety and fear, the evocation of feelings of sorrow and loss, and the deepening of empathic ties between children and their survivor parents. As a study of the social inheritance of traumatic memory, the research offers new insights on the relationship between memorial culture and the role of memory in shaping survivor identities

Limitations as Possibilities: Uri Orlev’s Holocaust Narratives for Children and Young Adults

Limitations as Possibilities:Uri Orlev’s Holocaust Narratives for Children and Young Adults Rima Shikhmanter (bio) Relating to his experience as a survivor writing about the Holocaust, Uri Orlev—the most esteemed Israeli author of Holocaust literature for young readers—observes, I don’t know if writing about the past helps me to get over it. What I do know is that there is no grown-up way to talk, tell, or think about the things that happened to me. I have to remember them as if I were still a boy, with all the strange details—some funny, some moving—that childhood memories have and that children have no problem with. As a grown-up, I can’t imagine my own children living through what I did. I can’t even begin to think about it without cutting off the thought. It’s like walking very carefully on a frozen lake. If I were to take a sudden step—I mean, if I were to think of what happened then as the 65-year-old man I am today—the ice would break and I would tumble through it without being able to climb back. (The Sandgame 55–56) This quote from Orlev’s autobiographical children’s book The Sandgame indicates a self-aware insight crucial to our understanding of his narratives. In it, the author reveals himself as a self-conscious grownup whose depths are bared precisely in the recognition of his limited ability to remember and recount as an adult. The depiction of the delicate oscillation between childhood/adulthood and awareness/nonawareness in Orlev’s narratives, and the means by which it enables personal and ideological coping with the traumatic past, lie at the heart of this essay. Born Jerzy Henryk Orlowski in Warsaw in 1931, Uri Orlev survived the Holocaust with his younger brother—first in the Warsaw Ghetto, then in hiding, and finally in Bergen-Belsen. When the war ended, the two youngsters made their way to British Palestine, settling on Kibbutz [End Page 1] Ginegar.1 Orlev’s first publication was a lyrical autobiography for adults, The Lead Soldiers (1956); two other adult books—Until Tomorrow (1958) and The Last Summer Vacation: Stories (1968)—followed in its wake. After these early works, Orlev dedicated himself to children’s literature, the first of his children’s books appearing in the mid-1970s. He only began writing about the Holocaust for a young audience in the early 1980s, after he had established a reputation as a children’s author, with nine published books and many Israeli prizes to his name. Today, he is one of Israel’s most esteemed children’s writers and the most prominent author of Holocaust literature for young readers. His children’s books have also received critical acclaim worldwide, as indicated by the numerous awards and prizes they have won. He is also the first—and thus far, the only—Israeli children’s writer to have received a Hans Christian Andersen Gold Medal, awarded by the International Board on Books for Young People in 1996. In recent years, the discourse regarding the literary representation of the Holocaust has largely revolved around issues relating to trauma and atrocity: how can the unspeakable—which by definition defies construction as a “closed,” causal narrative and precludes the drawing of any meaning from events—be written about?2 Children’s literature seems to lie beyond the bounds of this discourse, as the cognitive and emotional limitations of its audience demand that the stories they read are structured, coherent, carry a clear plot, are optimistic, have a good ending, and convey a lesson—or at least a “making of sense.” As Hamida Bosmajian and Adrienne Kertzer both argue in their discussions of children’s Holocaust literature, writing for children necessarily restricts or restrains representation of the atrocity, since the educational requirements imposed on children’s literature and the need to protect the child lead many to assert that children must be spared from exposure to its horrors. Children’s Holocaust literature is thus generally distinguished from that meant for adults by the fact that “what is distressing is softened and what is traumatic is made coherent . . . what...

The Perils of Empathy: Holocaust Narratives, Cognitive Studies and the Politics of Sentiment

Cognitive science research offers new insights into the structures of empathy, and scholars are beginning to apply that research to reader reception of literature. Teachers of Holocaust Studies will find that these insights will challenge pedagogical strategies that assume empathy always leads to the development of social virtue in students. Drawing on research from cognitive studies, this essay suggests that Holocaust narratives that disrupt empathic response are more likely to produce a particular form of empathy, cognitive empathy. This form of empathy in particular can facilitate critical social understanding of the Holocaust that links the past to civic consciousness and activity in the present. Through the examination of three texts, Elie Wiesel’s Night, Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, the author demonstrates how and what kinds of empathy are potentially produced in Holocaust literature and suggests textual typologies to guide instruction.

After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future ed. by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan (review)

After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future ed. by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan (review)

Communities of memory and the problem of transmission

In this article we explore the issue of memory transmission by considering it along the two temporal planes on which it occurs: vertically, through time; and horizontally, in time. It is because we regard memory transmission as involving the mutual interaction of these two planes that we introduce the concept of the mnemonic imagination. The value of the concept is that it enables us to see, inter alia, how communities of memory emerge. Our route into this is the sociology of generations and most particularly the evidence of mnemonic transmission provided by second-generation Holocaust narratives. The purpose of the article is to bring together a range of work relevant to the sharing and inheritance of memory across and within time, to explore the application of collective mnemonic frames in processes of personal remembering, and so move us closer to understanding the mechanism by which experience derived from others becomes integrated into our own life-stories.

Tales from Over There: The Uses and Meanings of Fairy-Tales in Contemporary Holocaust Narrative

Tales from Over There: The Uses and Meanings of Fairy-Tales in Contemporary Holocaust Narrative

Scatology, Chopped Liver, and the Last Supper: Daniel Zimmermann's Holocaust NovelL'Anus du monde

Intellectual trends in the study of scatology have all tended to agree on the subversive character of scatological rhetoric and representation for social, political, institutional, religious, literary, and artistic discourses. This article offers a brief overview of these trends in order to situate an aspect of Holocaust narrative that has attracted far less attention than other polemical subjects such as the relationship between fiction, history, and memory, or sexuality and violence. The study takes as its focal point the critically neglected novel L’Anus du monde (1996) by the French writer Daniel Zimmermann, in which the scatological, though constituting an excremental assault on the reader’s literary and moral sensibilities, functions against its usually subversive intent. By tracing the novel’s anti-hero on his journey from Drancy to Auschwitz and Treblinka, Zimmermann links the scatological to the themes of gastronomy and anthropophagy, leading ineluctably to the novel’s deeply unsettling conclusion, which in fact has less to do with the scatological than with the Christological overtones of sacrifice and redemption.

A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction Myrna Goldenberg, Professor Emerita A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, by Ruth Franklin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $29.95. In A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin challenges the nearly axiomatic principle proffered by Elie Wiesel and Theodor Adorno that neither fiction nor poetry can—or even should—represent the Holocaust accurately. Using terms like "documentary fiction," "documentary novel," "autobiographical fiction," and "novelistic work," Franklin justifies the de-sanctification of the survivor memoir. She sets out to prove that well-written novels and literary memoirs do treat the unimaginable both truthfully and informatively. She is courageous in her refusal to bow to "ownership" of the Holocaust as claimed by Elie Wiesel and some of his cohort of survivors and is downright contemptuous [End Page 153] of the Second Generation's co-optation of ownership, that is, "they identify so strongly with the sufferings of their parents as to assert themselves as witnesses to the Holocaust." She pulls no punches in her attacks on "the most pernicious aspect of the second generation phenomenon: the virtual displacement of the survivors by their own descendants through the appropriation of Holocaust narratives." For Franklin, Melvin Jules Bukiet is its most egregious culprit. A granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she views her own generation of writers for whom the Holocaust is both central and backdrop as a literary critic, expecting neither fidelity nor indifference to the facts. Citing Nathan Englander's as the "most brilliant treatment of the Holocaust in contemporary American fiction," she goes on to find literary merit in novels and short stories of Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon. The meat of her book, though, is her analyses of the major work of six survivors—Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, Imre Kertesz—and four writers who used survivor memoirs as the bases of their works—Thomas Keneally/Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Koeppen, W. G. Sebald, and Bernhard Schlink. Labeling Borowski as an "angry young man," Franklin applauds his "utterly unforgiving way in which [his stories] portray the behavior of the prisoners toward each other," thereby exploding myths of heroism and martyrdom and simultaneously ruining his career. Examining whether Borowski is actually the narrator of This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Franklin praises both his lack of sentimentality and his detached voice. In the face of his recently published letters from Auschwitz recently published as well as interviews of his fellow prisoners, it is hard to merge these several characterizations with the book's narrator. Is the book a memoir? Or an imaginative treatment of Borowski's observations? Is its narrator a moral voice? Is Borowski's voice a moral statement? Her chapters on other survivor writers are no less gripping. Primo Levi's books were "autobiographical, but they were not autobiography," asserts Franklin. Extracting material from Levi's works and life, Franklin finds that Levi's writing reveals his interest in subjects other than the Holocaust, although certainly his experiences in Auschwitz color all his work. She refuses to accept his death as a suicide, pointing out that vertigo was a serious side effect of his medications. In fact, we might consider "that Auschwitz kept Levi alive for forty years as a writer. . . ." This trenchant chapter on Levi is followed by an equally insightful one on Wiesel in which Franklin points to Wiesel's balance "between fidelity to the events it portrays and the making of literature." Sparing no praise for Night, she explores Wiesel's denial of his memoir as a narrative of his loss of faith, tracking the minor fracas of this denial even through the various translations of this influential memoir. There are no weak chapters [End Page 154] in A Thousand Darknesses, but among those that stand out is her extended analysis of Schindler's Ark/Schindler's List. Franklin tracks the history of the book and the film, explaining how the changes that Keneally and Spielberg made were appropriate for their respective media; in doing so, she keeps her readers aware of both the power and cost of the application of imagination to historical fact. In...

After testimony: the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust narrative for the future

Imre Kertesz's fatelessness : fiction as testimony / J. Hillis Miller ; Challenges for successor generations of German-Jewish authors in Germany / Beatrice Sandberg ; Recent literature confronting past : France and beyond / Philippe Mesnard, translated by Terence Cave ; Performing a perpetrator as witness : Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes / Susan Rubin Suleiman ; The ethics and aesthetics of backward narration in Martin Amis's Time's arrow / James Phelan ; The face-to-face encounter in Holocaust narrative / Jeremy Hawthorn ; Knowing little, adding nothing : ethics and aesthetics of remembering in Espen Sobye's Kathe, always lived in Norway / Anniken Greve ; When facts are scarce : authenticating strategies in writing by children of survivors / Irene Kacandes ; Objects of return / Marianne Hirsch ; Narrative, memory, and visual image : W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur and Austerlitz / Jakob Lothe ; Which narrative of Auschwitz? A narrative analysis of Laurence Rees's documentary Auschwitz : Nazis and the final solution / Anette H. Storeide ; Moving testimonies : unhomed geography and Holocaust documentary of return / Janet Walker ; From Auschwitz to Temple Mount : binding and unbinding Israeli narrative / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi ; The melancholy generation : Grossman's Book of interior grammar / Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan ; Fractured relations : multidirectional Holocaust memory of Caryl Phillips / Michael Rothberg ; Hiroshima and Holocaust : tales of war and defeat in Japan and Germany-a contrastive perspective / Anne Thelle.

Grandparents Reveal Their Secrets: A New Holocaust Narrative for the Young ‘Third Generation’ in Israel

Since the 1990s, a new type of Holocaust story has been emerging in Israeli children's literature. This new narrative is directed towards very young children, from preschool to the first years of elementary school, and its official goal is to instil in them an authentic ‘first Holocaust memory’. This essay presents the literary characteristics of this new Holocaust narrative for children and its master narrative. It brings into light a new profile of both writers and readers. The writers were young children during the Holocaust, and first chose to tell their stories from the safe distance of three generations. The readers are their grand-children and their grand-children's peers, who are assigned an essential role as listeners. These generational roles – the roles of a First Generation of writers and of a Third Generation of readers – are intrinsically familial ones. As such, they mark a significant change in the profile of yet another important figure in the Israeli intergenerational Holocaust discourse, the agent of the Holocaust story for children. Due to the new literary initiatives, the task of providing young children with a ‘first Holocaust memory’ is transferred from the educational authority, where it used to reside, to the domestic sphere.

Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (review)

Reviewed by: Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding Thomas Kühne Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding. By Alon Confino. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 180. Paper $24.99. ISBN 978-0736329. “The accumulation of facts in massive studies is accompanied by diminishing interpretative returns.” Based on this verdict on Holocaust history and the “sense of déjà [End Page 435] vu” that “many contributions” to the field evoke (41), Alon Confino urges historians to invest more time and energy in reflecting on the ways they do history, i.e., on the conceptual categories they use, consciously or unconsciously, while writing history. In a field that is indeed inclined to exhaust itself by lapsing into documentary narratives or into recycling the same old models of explanation, this request is reasonable—although Confino is not the first to think about the historiography rather than just the history of the Holocaust. A number of leading scholars, such as Ian Kershaw, Yehuda Bauer, Michael Marrus, and Omer Bartov have, of course, already done so. More recently, other scholars, including Dan Stone, Tom Lawson, and Peter Hayes and John Roth, as well as Paul Bartrop and Steven Leonard Jacobs, have produced comprehensive surveys and biographical compendiums on Holocaust historiography. Confino’s work is not just another survey of the research, however. He is interested in the metahistory of the Holocaust. According to him, much of the extant Holocaust historiography is still burdened by the idea that the Holocaust was a unique event that cannot be represented, described, or explained in the same way as other historical events. Confino’s book takes aim at exactly this kind of mystification of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was surely an extreme event, he says, but one that reveals the opportunities and restrictions of historical interpretation precisely because of its extreme nature. Foundational Pasts demonstrates how Holocaust historiography navigates through conceptual, categorical, and interpretive problems that shape, and have shaped, other historiographies as well. The comparative paradigm is the French Revolution. Both the French Revolution and the Holocaust have served as “foundational pasts,” as events that have been considered as ruptures—not only of political regimes, societies, or economic orders, but also of all other dimensions of human life, experience, and morality. Since the 1960s or 1970s, the Holocaust has replaced the French Revolution as the one foundational past of the West, as well as other parts of the world. Foundational Pasts is divided into two sections. The first, “Thinking the Holocaust,” outlines some general thoughts on Holocaust historiography and the 1789–1933 comparison, which leads into an in-depth analysis and favorable critique of the role the voices of victims’ diaries play in Saul Friedlaender’s preeminent Holocaust narrative, Years of Extermination (New York, 2007). In his second section, “Thresholds and Limits of History,” Confino examines how four principle issues of historical writing have shaped, advanced, or obstructed explanations offered by Holocaust scholars. These include issues of periodization, as well as definitions of the Holocaust’s beginnings, ruptures, and endings. Confino also examines historians’ dedication to contexts, which he says has made historians overestimate the military confrontation of World War II as a reason for the Holocaust. Another conceptual problem that Confino addresses is the popularity of the category “contingency,” and, related to this, the search for agency and the choices of historical actors. He rightly [End Page 436] warns against confusing different degrees of contingency in different historical situations. The fourth conceptual problem of Holocaust historiography that he addresses results from its fixation on antisemitism as an ideology. Confino suggests using the tools of cultural history instead, in order to explore more complex belief systems (including religion), emotions, obsessions, and social practices as conditions that allowed for the perpetration of the Holocaust. Not all of Confino’s observations may sound new to historians familiar with the field, but it is nevertheless an inspiring and well written book; any advanced class on Holocaust historiography will profit from it. Of course, this book cannot cover all the issues of Holocaust historiography. One of these is the deep entanglement of Holocaust research, and thus historiography, in memory and identity politics (Jewish, non-Jewish, American, German, Polish...

The detonation of the Holocaust in 1941: a tale of two books

The detonation of the Holocaust in 1941: a tale of two books

Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses Daniel H. Magilow Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase (Eds.) Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Pp. xvi, 245. Cloth $60.00. ISBN 978-1-84545-676-4. Holocaust historians have never relied exclusively on perpetrator-created sources to narrate and analyze the genocide of European Jewry, but the fact that so many sources were German-language documents written for Nazi audiences might sometimes lead one to think otherwise. While perpetrators' perspectives are certainly crucial components of Holocaust narratives, the scholarly focus on body counts and grisly details of the mechanisms of annihilation has ominous collateral effects. In Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (2007), Omer Bartov criticized this scholarly fixation on Jewish death as echoing the perpetrator's mindset because it "[brings the Jews] into history for the sole purpose of depicting their extermination." The challenge is to reinscribe the Holocaust into a broader narrative not just of European history but of Jewish history and Jewish identity. Francis R. Nicosia's and David Scrase's edited volume Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses is one example of the fruits of a new scholarly focus intended as a corrective to such "perpetrator source fetishism." This reorientation has benefitted from new institutional initiatives, notably the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's (USHMM) source edition project "Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933-1946." This concerted effort to acquire and preserve archival materials created by Jewish individuals and organizations before, during, and after the Holocaust is helping open the way for new approaches to the topic. Nicosia's and Scrase's volume of scholarly essays is the conference proceedings of a similarly titled 2006 Symposium at the University of Vermont's Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies that approached Holocaust history from victims' perspectives. The symposium brought together a group of prominent Holocaust scholars to examine questions about German Jewish identity in Germany in the 1930s from the perspectives of the persecuted Jews themselves. What did it mean to belong to a loyal, patriotic, and economically important minority group when the government deemed it a threat and systematically suffocated it? In his introduction, Nicosia recognizes that these questions are not entirely unexplored ones. To frame them, he briefly surveys the legal basis of German persecution in the 1930s and cites earlier research on the subject, some of it by the volume's own contributors. He shows how the volume does not [End Page 77] simply rehash old territory, even if the outlines of the history of Germany's discriminatory legislation in the 1930s are well known. Although Nicosia does not explicitly say so, what follows is a tightly focused set of essays that wisely strive for depth and close analysis of selected topics, rather than an encyclopedic coverage of the daily experiences of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s. Central themes are Jewish institutions and spaces: Konrad Kwiet writes on the de facto ghettoization enforced through the creation of Judensiedlungen (Jewish Settlements) and Judenhäuser (Jews' Houses); Beate Meyer considers the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany); and Michael Brenner discusses theater and the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural League.) Aside from his introduction, Nicosia also contributes an essay about Zionism in Nazi Berlin. Though all of the essays are of high quality, several merit special comment for their focus on the Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) of Jewish life and identity in 1930s Germany. Developing further her widely respected work on the subject, for instance, Marion Kaplan examines changes in family dynamics. Kaplan influentially characterized German Jewish experiences as suspended "between dignity and despair" in her 1998 work of the same name. Families that might not ever have identified themselves as Jewish found themselves categorized as such and subject to new pressures. The extent to which the notion that the family is always a "haven in a heartless world" was a useful fiction became increasingly obvious. (16) The many new economic, social, and psychological pressures that Jewish families faced created a situation in which "their world was shrinking and Jews spent more and more...

Cartographies of non-space: journeys to the end of the world in Holocaust literature

The article explores the reverse of the idea of ‘fluid cartographies’ by focusing on a modern radical experience of non-time and non-space. Taking as a starting point fictional testimonies by Jorge Semprun, Albert Drach and H. G. Adler, various spatial figurations in Holocaust literature, in particular those that centre on a dystopian inversion of the topos of travel, are analysed. The extreme constriction of the experience of space in Holocaust narratives testifies to the reaching of an uncharted finis terrae that cruelly puts into question the very idea of cartography as the utopian celebration of an intelligible world.

“Don’t give me away, Mummy”. Message and emotion in a Jewish woman’s Holocaust narrative

“Don’t give me away, Mummy”. Message and emotion in a Jewish woman’s Holocaust narrative

In Search Of The Final Solution

The narrative device of Historian-As-Detective is practically a standardized feature of contemporary Holocaust fiction, replicating as it does the reader's own quest for understanding of the Holocaust. Contemporary Holocaust narratives can be seen to borrow heavily from some of the most recognizable narrative patterns of crime fiction (specifically the individual quest for knowledge in the face of a crisis that threatens the fabric of social order), creating a dialectic between knowing and not-knowing that is played out in the symbiotic relationship between two or more narrative strands. This article examines similarities in both structure and effect which exist between the two genres and explores the explicit manifestation of these similarities in Michael Chabon's The Final Solution (2006) and The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007).

The Curious Conflation of Hanukkah and the Holocaust in Jewish Children's Literature

In recent years, a large number of Jewish children's books have twinned Hanukkah stories with Holocaust narratives. What brings these two groups of narratives together, and what meanings are provoked by their combination? In this article, I examine several children's selections, dating from 1990 to the present, through the lenses of memory studies and Bakhtinian literary criticism, focusing on three major themes: the interplay of trauma and nostalgia, the representation of intergenerational dialogue, and the use of literary artifacts to bridge time. I argue that the literary conflation of these two events results in an historical flattening, eliding the substantial differences between these two moments of persecution; at the same time, I attend to the sometimes quite complicated and evocative moments of memory provoked by this textual linking.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Who will carry the word? The threshold between unspeakability and silence in the Holocaust narratives of Charlotte Delbo and Jorge Semprun

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeView retraction statement:Statement of Retraction

The Holocaust in the nursery: Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay

With particular attention to Anita Desai’s use of German nursery rhymes and children’s songs, this article offers a reading of the Holocaust narrative in her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay in relation to interpretive expectations informed by discourses of the Holocaust and postcolonialism and to the appropriation of the novel to one or the other of these paradigms. It suggests that the novel transcends such interpretive patterns by structurally engaging the reader’s participation in the creation of meaning.

Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Eva C. Karpinski (bio) Bella Brodzki. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-804-75542-9, $21.95. In this pioneering study, translation is a matter of life and death. Bella Brodzki engages Walter Benjamin’s metaphysical and materialist model of translation, and its elaboration by Jacques Derrida, focusing on the survival of bodies, texts, narratives, images, and memories through cross-cultural and inter generational transmission that is both transcending death and life-giving, linked to an “afterlife” and to “living on.” She offers a compelling examination of the combined genealogical and generative—or commemorative and animating—functions of translation viewed as instrumental to all processes of continuity and change in literature, culture, and history. In Brodzki’s hands, such a broad view of translation proves extremely productive in the service of hermeneutics, applied to a range of American, European, and African texts, fictional and autobiographical, whose historical frames coincide with late modernity and postmodernity. Her selections are marked by or reverberate with echoes of catastrophic events, including slavery, colonialism, war, and the Holocaust, as well as different forms of epistemic violence. Translation appears under many guises as a trope, a theme, a structural device, a metafictional concern, or a textual strategy. It becomes an indispensable concept to explore issues of diasporic literacy, authorship and reading, gender performativity and sexual agency, resistant subjectivities and genres, postcoloniality, trauma, and historical memory. While Brodzki’s theorizing of translation is influenced by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, her approach never fails to recognize that texts operate in the material world shaped by the commercial and political demands of a global literary marketplace. Of particular interest to scholars of auto/biography and life writing are those chapters that deal with contemporary fictional adaptations of the genre of the American slave narrative as well as with Holocaust survivor narratives. Brodzki interprets three novels by Charles Johnson, Buchi Emecheta, and André Schwartz-Bart as translations that extend and rejuvenate generic definitions by shifting from a national to a transnational understanding of the experience of slavery. On the other hand, her analysis of autobiographical texts by Claude Morhange-Begue and Jorge Semprun allows her to articulate [End Page 838] autobiography’s relation to mourning and its “testimonial and testamentary” agenda of memorializing trauma and loss, the two terms that she refuses to conflate. Semprun is an especially important case study highlighting Brodzki’s own position and providing a bridge to the Epilogue, which is more of a climax than a coda to the book. In the Epilogue, she includes her own story: a second-generation Holocaust narrative that stages a “scene of inheritance” of her parents’ survivorship. I would argue that the Epilogue recasts the entire book as a testimonial project, and that her text, like Semprun’s writing, is the result of the recuperative work of mourning and translating the past. Indirectly, via her readings, she testifies to those catastrophic moments in history mediated by literature that continue to haunt us in the present and that cannot be forgotten. Hence, in her praxis, literary criticism is called upon to become an act of bearing witness and memorializing, the functions it shares with autobiography. The centrality of her discussion of Semprun is visible in the reflexive mirroring between the subject and the method of her analysis. She registers the moment when Derrida died while she was writing her chapter—echoing Semprun’s recollection of the radio announcement of Primo Levi’s death. Her text thus evolves into a new hybrid genre: the choice of authors and the framework of trauma and memory bring us closer and closer to the writing subject, the signatory of this book, who translates literary criticism into a form of life writing. Similar to Semprun’s, her own project is informed by a profound relationship with death. However, they both reject redemptive or triumphalist notions of literature as offering mastery through language; rather, the meaning of survival lies in a repeated recurrence of death and loss. Brodzki’s writing is derived from the need to understand history and...